UD has noticed that people tend to feel very strongly about cruelty. Wanton cruelty tends to rub people the wrong way.
How else can you explain the guilty-all-the-way verdict that just came down against the Rutgers University student whose secret filming of his gay roommate having sex so devastated the roommate that when he realized what had been done to him he killed himself?
Dharun Ravi’s lawyers argued his tender age (twenty), the clueless immaturity of the guy, etc. And Ravi must have thought it would work, because he refused a no-jail plea bargain. But the sheer vicious degeneracy of it all – especially given the vulnerable personality of the suicide, a person just beginning to discover who he was – seems to have riled the jurors.
After he serves his time, Dharun faces deportation.
March 16th, 2012 at 3:32PM
Clementi was already out of the closet, thus it seems quite a stretch that Ravi could have reasonably anticipated that Clementi would off himself as a result. Of course that in no way justifies or excuses Ravi’s activities. If Clementi had been straight and had the unidentified third party been a woman, Ravi’s actions would still be reprehensible.
The statement from Rutgers is wrongheaded.
All this ‘the importance of civility’ talk shows that Rutgers misunderstands the issues and the university’s place in dictating the nature of interactions between people. Civility codes on campuses are flatly unenforceable (provided the university is a public school, or a private one which actively promotes itself as a bastion of free expression). The Rutgers statement implicitly furthers the perception that incivility itself is an actionable offense.
The problem was not that Ravi was impolite, rather it is that he engaged in invasion of privacy, intimidation and various forms of obstruction of justice. This is not about someone being offended, or even about someone being humiliated per se. It is about a devastating humiliation which results from activities society has rightly identified as criminal.
March 16th, 2012 at 9:07PM
According to the recent New Yorker piece, or at least my recollection of it, Ravi refused the plea because that would have still left him liable to deportation.
March 16th, 2012 at 10:26PM
Ian: Thanks for that detail – I didn’t know. That helps explain the rejection of the plea deal.
March 17th, 2012 at 1:04PM
The New Yorker piece is worth a read –
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/06/120206fa_fact_parker
March 19th, 2012 at 9:32AM
I couldn’t disagree with this more.
When I was Ravi’s age, there’s no way I could have dealt with a gay roommate bringing home a 30-year-old man to have sex in my tiny dorm room. I would have been the one committing suicide. There’s no way Rutgers should endorse that.
And the article seems to indicate that’s the biggest cruelty that happened. Nobody even saw Clementi naked. We have no idea why Clementi killed himself.
It’s one thing when gays demand a right to equality of employment, but it’s another thing altogether when they stick their sex lives in our faces and demand that we pretend it’s not universal human nature to be disgusted by it. But modern political correctness is all about reshaping human nature, especially the parts that can’t actually be reshaped.
Ravi is a political prisoner, a sacrificial victim to the maw of liberalism at its self-righteous, narcissistic worst. His punishment will far exceed the crime.
March 22nd, 2012 at 5:31PM
I wholly agree with Jonathan. I *might* be OK with having a gay roommate if he refrained from having sex with other guys in our dorm room. If he asked me to leave the room so he could have sex with another guy, I would flatly refuse. If he did it anyway, I would complain to the RA and request a room change. If this failed, I would demand to be allowed to live off campus. I might even sue the university.
Colleges are right to deny roommate change requests on the basis of race or ethnicity. However, sexual orientation is an entirely different matter. I have every right to be in my dorm room and not to have to witness behavior that disgusts me. My roommate has a right to privacy, but not at my expense. I have privacy rights too!
Tyler Clementi had many options aside from killing himself. At a place like Rutgers, there are many resources available for counseling and mediation of disputes between students. Clementi could have obtained immediate relief simply by going to his RA and asking for help.
Why was Ravi convicted of tampering with evidence for deleting or changing his Twitter posts? He has every right to edit or delete his own posts on social networking sites. Using his online comments against him is essentially convicting him of a thought crime. His expression of disgust upon discovering that his roommate was gay is also not a crime. Ravi was wrong to secretly record Clementi’s activities without permission, but this does not meet the standard required for a “hate crime”. Our justice system is so out of whack that Ravi could get more prison time for this incident than drunk drivers get for DUI homicide! At least he’s unlikely to face retribution in prison; there aren’t too many “gay gangs” in there.